The Wind Powering America (WPA) programme, part of the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, has for the last decade developed high-resolution maps modelling the wind resource at 50-metre tower hub heights. Larry Flowers, national technical director of WPA, says the latest of these showed an aggregate 7,200GW of potential wind resource.
The new maps model wind speeds at 80 metres and show potential wind capacity of nearly 10,459GW, an additional 31% relative to the 50-metre maps.
